Lionel Baier’s “Garçon Stupide” is touching and sad —
and occasionally original — without being wholly successful. It blends
material from both Baier’s and his non-actor star Pierre Chatigny’s
lives for the portrait of twenty-year-old Loic, a French-speaking Swiss
gay guy who divides his time between an assembly-line job at a chocolate
factory in the town of Bulle; graphically shown anonymous sex Loic
finds via Internet; taking photos with his cellphone (which makes him
dream of being a photographer); and chatting with his long-time pal
Marie, a more mature woman at whose place he mostly sleeps. The
split-screen sequences in which Loic’s intense, bold sex scenes and the
hammering factory machinery at his day job get paralleled are very
obvious; but they do have the virtue of sharply veering away from the
saccharine, super-sincere quality of so many gay coming-of-age films.
This director doesn’t look away from the mindless, self-destructive
aspects of his main character. Unfortunately “Garçon Stupide” ultimately
plays out too randomly to have an overriding viewpoint.
Loic
becomes enraged at Marie one night. Her new relationship with a man has
made him jealous. He calls her a slut, forgetting he’s a super-slut
himself. She kicks him out and says the relationship is over. This
changes everything, since now he has no friend he can count on, or any
friendly place to sleep.
The film, which is a rough but assured collage up to
here held together by its vérité feel and the tall, striking (if
blank-faced) Chatigny’s strong physical presence, disintegrates into
fantasy and sentimentality after the breakup with Marie. A narrative
that had seemed real now begins to feel like thoughtless improvisation.
Something happens to Marie. Loic wanders off and has a telegraphed car
accident. He cashes in his savings to buy a professional quality video
camera. In a pathetic, pointless digression, he pursues a minor football
star from Portugal who plays on one of the local teams.
All this undercuts the simple specificity of the
earlier sections and gives the film the appearance of having lost its
way. Loic is naive, emotionally stunted, and ignorant: he tries to look
things up in a dictionary but since the lacunae include such basics as
Hitler and Impressionism, he has a long way to go to reach the
middle-class/artistic life he dreams of. He is estranged from his family
and without Marie has no one. The film, which avoids the conventional
gay coming-of-age clichés, ends on a down note for two reasons — because
both Loic and his future are dim, and because director Baier lets his
first film’s promising opening crumble away into random pieces as it
moves along. Loic ends with a long catalogue of things he is not going
to become, but there’s no sense of where he’s going or what he will be.
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